The Professional Counselor | Volume 13, Issue 1 29 Moreover, OCD and associated symptoms are frequently misunderstood, even among mental health professionals who are trained to diagnose the disorder. In a quantitative study of mental health counselors and graduate students, participants exhibited stigma toward OCD symptoms related to sexual thoughts, violent thoughts, and contamination (Steinberg & Wetterneck, 2017). Further, Glazier et al. (2013) found issues pertaining to the accurate and timely diagnosis of OCD among APA members due to misidentification of OCD symptoms. In this quantitative study, participants were asked to provide a diagnosis for five case vignettes, each depicting various OCD obsessive symptoms. There was a 38.9% misidentification rate of OCD across the vignettes, with variation in rates based on the symptoms presented in each vignette. The vignette describing symptoms related to contamination was misidentified at the lowest rate of 15.8%, although the vignette describing symptoms of obsessions related to “homosexuality” was misdiagnosed at a rate of 77.0% (Glazier et al., 2013). In sum, OCD is an often stigmatized and misunderstood disorder, resulting in challenges for individuals living with OCD and for mental health counselors attempting to accurately diagnose OCD in their clients (Fennell & Boyd, 2014; Fennell & Liberato, 2007; Glazier et al., 2013; Steinberg & Wetterneck, 2017). TikTok: Social Media Phenomenon and Social Change Agent Although researchers have explored the use of the term OCD in the vernacular and on social media, along with associated impacts on people living with OCD (Fennell & Boyd, 2014), researchers have yet to explore how particular mental health diagnoses such as OCD are portrayed and discussed on TikTok, a popular social media application, or “app,” released globally in 2017 (Iqbal, 2022). TikTok’s content consists of brief videos created by users, which can be viewed and interacted with by other users (Anderson, 2020). TikTok uses an algorithm to show users videos that appeal to their interests. Users interact on the platform through likes, comments, reactions, and direct messages. Hashtags are added to videos to help individuals search for specific types of content. To have full access to TikTok, a user must have an active account; individuals with accounts can create a profile page, which can be used with various privacy settings (Anderson, 2020). The scope of TikTok is vast, reaching an average of 689 million users worldwide every month, with 100 million users in the United States (Iqbal, 2022). According to Iqbal (2022), TikTok reached over 1.4 billion users in 2022. The app is frequented by individuals of various ages, nationalities, genders, and socioeconomic statuses and in 2022, TikTok was downloaded over 3.3 billion times (Iqbal, 2022). Based on TikTok’s wide reach, it is reasonable to assume that content shared on the app has implications for how society views certain topics, including mental health disorders, as meaning is constructed through interactions with others on the application. Vitikainen et al. (2020) described TikTok as a social change agent, noting that despite the app’s ban on political campaign–related content, users have utilized TikTok for political movements, such as joining together to sabotage a Donald Trump rally in 2020 (Lorenz et al., 2020). Further, TikTok videos and hashtags were used to spread information about wearing masks during the COVID-19 pandemic (Basch, Fera, et al., 2021). The World Health Organization TikTok videos related to wearing a mask were viewed over 57 million times, and just 100 TikToks with the hashtag “#WearaMask” were viewed over 500 million times (Basch, Fera, et al., 2021). As the app has such an extensive user base, “TikTok has great potential in conveying important public health messages to various segments of the population” (Basch, Fera, et al., 2021, para. 18). It stands to reason that if TikTok videos can influence social action and aid in the spread of public health information, they also could be a powerful tool in either upholding or dismantling misunderstanding and stigma around mental health disorders such as OCD. However, researchers have highlighted the existence of misinformation on popular social media platforms, including TikTok (Sharevski et al.,
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